Tag Archives: Free MP3

[Windows Only] Many years ago, I remember recording broadcast radio stations using reel-to-reel, 8-track and finally cassette tape recorders. It was pretty simple tune in your radio, start your tape recorder and let it run. The biggest drawback was that you didn’t have a song list and it was often hard to identify the artist or the name of the song playing.

These days, computers have made it much easier to record music. There are many methods to record the streaming music at internet radio stations and I’ve discovered that the MP3 VCR is one of the easiest. All you have to do is:

At Shoutcast, the link you need to drag and drop is the yellow TUNE INbutton.

Once you’ve started recording, you’ll see the main interface. There are a few buttons at the bottom that you can use for Pause, Stop, Listen or Mute while recording, Timed Recordings, Station Listings, Setup and Exit.

The station list is a nice feature. It allows you to play, add and remove Shoutcast radio streams.

MP3 VCR actually detects the song titles of most station streams and creates an MP3 file for each song.

This recorder is also advertised to work with stations at Live365.com. I haven’t had much luck with that, but I never use their service. There are thousands of stations at Shoutcast, what more can you ask for?

There are plenty of ways to record music from the internet. MP3 VCR is free and it’s one of the easiest recording methods I’ve tried. In addition to plenty of documentation, this program’s source code is also available. Based on what I’ve found so far, I can highly recommend MP3 VCR.

I am not sure about everyone, however, at-least once in your lifetime, you might have downloaded free music from the internet when it is not legal, or at-least had had the urge to do it.

Those days could now be a thing of the past, thanks to FreeAllMusic, whose service will allow users to download free music legally to their computers, albeit after watching some video ads. So does free mean crappy? Not exactly, according to NYT, 2 out of the 4 major music labels have signed up with the service and will provide the full catalog of songs for downloads. They even have a lineup of 6 major advertisers on board, including Coca Cola, Warner Bros and Zappos.

The best part about FreeAllMusic is that, you can legally share the music you download with anyone else. In technical terms, the music you download from the site is DRM free.

Users will have to spend 15-30 seconds to watch a video ad, before they can download the songs. However, that would mean that you save .99 cents per song. Limitations? Yes, there will be limitations as to how much music a user can download, however, there is no indications as to what the limitations are.

This is a win win situation for both advertisers and the users, as advertisers will be assured that their ads will be viewed and users will get free music.

Nevertheless, this system has it’s own flaws. For example, imagine that, I as a user want to download a MP3 file and start the process to download it, the video ad plays, and I walk out to get my coffee. After returning back, I download the free music without even watching the advertisements. Based on this, it is hard to say how long this will be a success, however, the concept is good and may become quite popular. Only time will tell, whether it is a hit or it is a fail.

FreeAllMusic is currently in beta and will open to public in late January. Would you prefer to download free music in lieu of advertisements? Let us know about your thoughts.

By the way, if you notice this, this is the 4000th post on Techie Buzz :-).

Honda has teamed up with Rhapsody – RealNetwork’s online music service, to offer free full MP3 downloads. This giveaway is a part of Honda’s “Everybody knows somebody who loves a Honda” campaign. In order to take advantage of this offer, head over to the ShareTheLove webpage. You can either preview the songs and download them individually, or download all of them together. No registration or personal details are required. The only catch is that you will have to watch a short Honda commercial before being allowed to download. The artists available are:

iTunes has a free sampler in collaboration with Starbucks, which allows users to download 20 songs for free. The songs that you get include: Cloud Nine by Ben Howard, A few Honest Words by Ben Sollee, I am not a farmer by Bill Frisell, Easy by Deer Tick, Belated Promise Ring by Iron & Wine among others.

The 20 songs would have cost you $20.40, however thanks to the giveaway you can download them all for free. To get your Free iTunes Starbucks Sampler, follow the steps given below.

Fancy the latest song that you heard on radio, but can’t buy it yet? Well it is time to throw caution to the wind and buy some MP3 right away, albeit for free. Amazon is offering downloads of $3 worth of MP3 files for free until 30th November 2009.